Social-Network-Sites (SNS) & its Impact on Students' Academic Learning Krishna Kanta Roy, Shilpi Singh and Shraddha Ratra Symbiosis School of Economics, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India {kk.roy, shilpi.singh, shraddha.ratra}@sse.ac.in Abstract- Social-Network-Sites (SNS) was developed to serve as a platform to connect people. Now a days its reach has magnified and it has become an integral parts of our lives. One can easily access the infinite pool of information, establish connection, share thoughts and videos and can also participate in interactive learning through SNS. It has completely revolutionized the society but what matters is how one is using these resources? The paper will focus on the positives and negatives of SNS, its impact on academic learning of the students and the frequency of them accessing these sites. The research is based on a sample of undergraduate students from Symbiosis International (Deemed University). Keywords: Social-Network-Sites (SNS), Academic Learning, Digital, Higher Education, Technology I. INTRODUCTION Social netwoking services are defined as web-based services that allows individual to create a public or semipublic profile, communicate with others, and view details provided by other prople within the bounded system (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). SNS is an easy way to engage in Computer-Mediated- Communication (CMC). According to a report (Smith & Anderson, 2018) Facebook and YouTube dominates the US market. Younger Americans between the ages of 18 to 24 stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of these use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users. Another report in 2016, showed Facebook with the highest penetration (63%) followed by FB Messenger, Instagram and Twitter, for ages between 18-29, globally (Chaffey, 2016). Informal learning through SNS has become popular. One can read and watch, articles and videos to learn about a particular phenomenon with the help of SNS. But the question is how much of it is used productively? Based on the 2009 and 2010 data from the EDUCASE center of Applied Research, 90% of the students responded that they use SNS and out of those only 30% were reported to use SNS for educational related activities (Chen & Bryer, 2012). The purpose of the study is to investigate the determinants of SNS and to test the relationship between SNS and academic learning. II. BACKGROUND The first recognisable SNS was known by the name of Sixdegrees.com and was incorporated in 1997. Over the years a variety of websites became a part of the SNS revolution. Such as Friendster (2002), LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), and many more (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). The umbrella term, SNS now focuses on tools that enhance communication through audio and visual capturing string, connecting and retrieving features that include a) Blogs, where people can publish and post what is in their mind, b) Wikis, a tool for collaborative academic writing, c) Media sharing, d) Promoting virtual communities to interact and communicate and e) Document sharing, giving editing rights to multiple users (Taylor, King, & Nelson, 2012). India has been reported to be the highest in terms of number of users of Facebook in the world (Livemint, 2017). This is followed by LinkedIn and Twitter. Almost 225 million people use YouTube, not only for watching videos but also to create content on it. Instagram along with the online digital encyclopedia platform, Quora, is also becoming famous. Given this popularity and the nature of the target population (College Students) and the objective, this study will focus on a select few SNS like Facebook, YouTube, Quora, Twitter and Instagram. III. IMPACT OF SNS ON SOCIETY It is been observed that the number of users accessing SNS is growing rapidly. When compared to other nations, Indian internet users prefer to spend more time on Social Networking Sites. Time spent on services (Emails, Instant Messaging etc.) by Indian internet users is only 23%, as compared to time spent on social networking sites, 25%, and on entertainment, 11% (Comscore, 2013). With this ever increasing popularity of SNS, it becomes imperative to ponder upon the positives and negatives associated with this. A. Positive impact The schools and colleges have recognised the changing scenario of the learning environment. Interactive social media communication and collaborative technologies in learning is now recognized as a globalized process. It has facilitated communication with the people belonging to different genres, easy dissemination of information, and works as a means of inventive expressions (Al-rahmi, Othman, & Musa, 2014). For example, social media 174 2018 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E) 978-1-7281-1143-8/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE DOI 10.1109/T4E.2018.00045